


Blood Happens

by scribblemyname



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Assassins and Spies, Avengers Tower, Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Cliche Comment Ficathon, Community: be_compromised, Fallout, Gen, PTSD, Partnership, Post-Battle of New York (Marvel), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, psych evals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-09-15
Packaged: 2018-02-17 13:04:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2310623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/scribblemyname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn't tell the Captain that this isn't the war they fought seventy years ago and that SHIELD doesn't deal in black and white. He doesn't explain that this is nothing compared to staring at your own brother's life bleeding out from a killshot arrow when you're in your right mind and he needed killing.</p><p>It's not exactly the kind of thing he figures Steve wants to hear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood Happens

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Happilydancing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Happilydancing/gifts).



> Prompt by happilydancing: [ I'd like to see the cliche that Clint had trouble after being brainwashed subverted. ](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com/419151.html?thread=8206671#t8206671)

They talk about guilt, like they know a single thing about him, and Clint hears them. Oh, _how_ does he hear them. He knows if the Council had their way, they would put him in their scope as easily as they'd ordered him to put Natasha in his once upon a time.  
  
Clint never had much time for self-recrimination. It's a nasty business. Blood happens.  
  
Psych clears him, though he hasn't been precisely 'cooperating,' and if Coulson could see the circles under his eyes he's been hiding behind sunglasses, his handler would bench him in a hot minute, but it's not from denied guilt eating away at his undersides any more than the Black Widow had looked up at him through that perfect sightline with any guilt for the blood on her hands of killing a man who needed killing.  
  


* * *

  
  
"How many?" he'd asked Natasha.  
  
"Don't do that to yourself."  
  
She knew he didn't need the sudden shock of grief to carry into battle, knew he didn't need to focus on the men down, the friends lost, or Coulson bleeding out in that Hulk-proof holding cell because he went and got reckless without Clint to do it for him. It wasn't grief he needed; it was that tight, hard coil of anger he wore after he'd been tortured or used, that battle-ready fury focused into killing what needed killing, not mourning who needed mourning.  
  


* * *

  
  
"If you ever need to talk," Steve offers once, hand gripping the railing tightly at the Avengers Tower.  
  
Clint nods, soldier to soldier. He's been in the trenches; he's fought in wars. Unlike Natasha, being a spy never really was his thing. He respects the Captain enough to silently acknowledge the offer without telling him that blood was on Loki's gloating fingertips and gushing from the Jotunn's ledger and there were people like Clint and Natasha and Fury to hold it against him.  
  
He doesn't tell the Captain that this isn't the war they fought seventy years ago and that SHIELD doesn't deal in black and white. He doesn't explain that this is nothing compared to staring at your own brother's life bleeding out from a killshot arrow when you're in your right mind and he needed killing.  
  
It's not exactly the kind of thing he figures Steve wants to hear.  
  


* * *

  
  
"Now you sound like yourself," Natasha had said, that slight smile in her voice.  
  
He did sleep better knowing that Loki's desire to break his mind, his will, and torture him with that same pain over again had been slapped back in a retort shaped like an arrow. Clint felt cold, hard satisfaction knowing that his hands held none of the blood or regrets Loki had tried to inflict and that Loki _knew_ it. He knew he'd failed. He knew that if he tried it again, Clint's arrow would not miss.

* * *

 

"So you probably know more about what Barnes is going through than anyone else," someone points out while Clint is distracted by Natasha humming a Russian lullaby over breakfast-making. He won't eat a thing she cooks, but she is beautiful.  
  
Then he realizes what was said and frowns. "Because of Tasha?" he wants to ask, but he catches himself. No one else really knows what his partner went through. He settles for rubbing the back of his neck and mumbling, "I guess," uncertainly.  
  
"You know," Bruce prods. "Loki."  
  
Clint's eyebrows come up at that. He's not slow on the uptake and he couldn't agree less. He shrugs. "Not the same." He cuts off the conversation by sliding up behind Natasha and stealing her spatula.  
  
Loki played with his mind like a smug child, and Clint hasn't forgiven it, but HYDRA destroyed Bucky's mind and it's not the same thing at all.  
  
Clint looks at Natasha, pausing as she snatches the spatula back, laughing. Clint knows now how it feels to be unraveled, but he never became the monster someone else fashioned him into. He just housed it for a while.  
  
No one hears Hawkeye and trembles in their boots because he's _still_ the monster someone else designed him to be.  
  


* * *

  
  
"Doesn't it bother you," the psychologist had asked, skeptical at his denial of any symptoms worse than the usual in his line of work, "all those people you killed?"  
  
Clint looked up at her and restrained a sigh of exasperation behind his usual working expression. All those people he killed. He had killed petty crooks on behalf of other crooks, he had killed terrorists for the army and worse for SHIELD. He'd killed his own brother with an arrow through the heart, and that is perhaps the only kill he truly regrets.  
  
Loki killed Coulson. Loki used Clint's hands and bow to kill good men and women who had worked for SHIELD, who had been Clint's coworkers and some his friends. Clint didn't kill them. He didn't dream of their dead faces screaming at him at night.  
  
He didn't tell psych that though. The woman hadn't earned the privilege.  
  
He simply answered, "No."


End file.
